Friday, November 29, 2013

Grab the noisemakers! Break out the pots and pans! Let's watch the ball
drop in Times Square! Happy New Y..... Wait. Not so fast....

The
fridge is burgeoning with Thanksgiving leftovers, the biggest
pre-Christmas shopping day of the year is in full swing, and I'm posting
a "Happy New Year" to my readers?!

Well...... Yes!

This
week our family is invited to a New Years Eve party scheduled for
Saturday evening. But with December 31st still some 4-5 weeks away we
will be welcoming another New Year, indeed, a more significant New Year
than that which the world over will acknowledge as the calendar switches
from 2013 to 2014.

Saturday,
November 30, 2013, is New Years Eve for the Church! Last Sunday we
celebrated the Last Sunday after Pentecost, and this Sunday is the First
Sunday of Advent, "New Years Day"--liturgically speaking--for the
Church. With that in mind, dear friends of ours are opening their home
for a liturgical New Years Eve party.

We are definitely in for the celebration!

It
likely won't be the raucous time the December 31 parties tend toward,
and I don't anticipate any noisemakers at midnight; in fact, most of us
will likely be back home with our kids in bed and asleep by then. But we
will have a wonderful time as we consider and anticipate the Church New
Year, beginning with our families gathering together for the Rosary,
followed by, what else, lots of good eats! Pots of chili, hot dogs,
drinks and snacks; good times spent with good friends.

And
so, leaving those pots and pans in the cupboard for another few weeks
we'll set our sights on Advent, and the coming of the Christ-Child, the
beginning of the 2014 liturgical year.

Monday, November 11, 2013

TheArchbishop Lefevbre - A Bishop for the Church
movie which has been seen in venues throughout the country and around
the world was shown yesterday in Portland, Oregon. Some members of my family
were able to see it, and my brother Rory was kind enough to offer the
following review:

I think we had a little over a hundred folks at our venue, almost half the parish.

It
was good. The enthusiasm with which the DVDs were purchased shows that
it was a success. Those with some background in the biographies and Mgr.
Lefebvre's books need to remember that the purpose wasn't to replace
the books, but to make Abp. Lefebvre come alive a little bit to a new
generation of Traditionalists either entering adulthood, or having
recently come to Tradition without a living memory of the situation
twenty years ago and more.

I am always critical of dubbing. Thankfully they never dubbed Abp. Lefebvre. It just seems like you miss a lot when somebody is talking over the person. Yes, you get the correct translation, but you miss
other ways we communicate audibly that seem important as well. There
was one short spot where Cardinal Ottaviani seemed animated and I really
wanted the "overvoice" to quiet down.Anyway,
that is really my only complaint. The theater was accommodating and
really terrific. They greeted us immediately as we by-passed the ticket
booth and showed us to the event, making a nice sign with the name of
our church on it so that parishioners would see where to go. It was
pretty neat to see above the door for our screen, "Archbishop Lefebvre"
in lights.

If there were any guests in the audience I missed
them. It all happened so quickly that we really didn't have opportunity
to promote the event. Everyone seemed very satisfied and I have to
include myself. The time went by quickly.

Its hard to say what
our Novus Ordo friends and relatives will think. The subject matter is
very close to our hearts and so to see a movie in a theater about it is
pretty energizing. It seems like at bare minimum, a fair viewing would
dispel some misconceptions about stubbornness. There are pictures and
video of his time in Africa which demonstrate how the Archbishop allowed
African culture to inform the native worship within a Traditional
framework. It seemed quite progressive to me, in a way of which it seems
no one could disapprove. I think the film shows that Mgr. Lefebvre was
clearly unwilling to bend an article of faith. But his firm courage was
gentle and thoughtful without the angry zeal that is the occasional
scourge of Tradionalists.

There are more scheduled screenings of this film. Check the list of planned screenings here for upcoming dates and locations. The movie will also be available for all on DVD on December 1--just in time for Christmas!--and may be pre-ordered now at Angelus Press.God bless you!

Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Pete over at the Et Cum Spiritu Tuo blog yesterday linked to an
article by Dennis Prager of the National Review Online, who writes about young people who stray away
from their father's values when they enter the liberal environment of so
many colleges and universities. It is an interesting article, and I
wholeheartedly agree with Pete when he says in his post that "we must
prepare our children for this hostile world."

I believe the
problem begins long before the child gets to the
hostile-to-conservative-Catholic-values environment of
college/university. IMHO, a properly formed Catholic young adult would not be so
easily swayed away from his father's values. But there is the rub: in our
day there is next to no proper traditional Catholic formation in the early
years for our children.

We are considering high school options for
our boys, but the options are so few! Where is the high school that
will help to form strong, Catholic young men?!

The principal of
the grade school they now attend recently sent home a quarter-end letter
to parents reiterating the values upheld and instilled in the students
at our little Catholic academy, at the root of which is saving each
child's soul. Yes, this. Where is the high school whose goals are so
clearly focused?

In looking at high school programs I was
perusing a well-known Catholic home school high school curriculum. In
their magazine they had an article about "Why...?" (...choose their HS
program). Except for a brief statement about their curriculum being
Catholic, the answers were mostly academic: Our graduates score high on
the SAT! Our graduates are accepted at all the major universities! Our
graduates achieve "success" out in the real world! Really? Is that all?
Yes I want academic excellence, and of course I want to see achievement
and success in our sons' pursuits beyond high school. But where is it
said that the graduates will have been nurtured and formed solidly in
their Catholic faith? Obviously such homeschool curriculum programs by their very nature cannot provide the hands-on opportunity to ensure such formation. And I
realize, too, that no program or school can guarantee an individual will
not go astray from his formation, but my goodness, let it be a stated goal, a
purpose for their existence alongside the academics! How many vocations
are coming out of the school/program? Shouldn't this be a measurable
statistic for most Catholic institutions?! I think it would have been in
some decades past.

Well, our boys weren't born in decades past,
but I still want that solid Catholic formation for them! I don't want to
bring my sons back to the basement homeschool classroom for their high school years where I would have
the nearly-entire responsibility to form them in this way. If I must (if
there is no alternative) then I will do it, and to the best of my ability. But it
is not, in my opinion, the ideal. No, ideally our sons would be taught, trained and formed
by priests in cassocks who have never ceased in their mission to pass on
the Catholic Faith as it has always been to the next generation of
young Catholics. Priests just like those who are caring for, teaching
and forming the children at our grade school academy, Queen of the Holy Rosary, where academics are given their place within the Catholic
faith but do not supersede it.

Certainly the institutions I describe
and desire seem few, but they do exist. One such school is Notre Dame de LaSalette Boys Academy. Yes, it is a distance from home. Yes, it would
mean boarding at the school. Yes, that would be most difficult in many
ways. But as a dear lady I know who, with her husband, has sent several
of her boys to LaSalette Academy says, "Sometimes you have to send them
away in order to keep them." Indeed. She has it on experience that when
her boys enter higher education they have not "left (their) father's
values" because of the solid Catholic formation that preceded it.
Deo Gratias!

As any Catholic parent, I do not want my boys to be
among the statistics from which Mr. Prager draws his article. Even in
this hostile-to-Catholic-faith world we live in, there are a few oases
of solid formation out there for our children. Of course this would
involve great sacrifice, but with an eternal perspective, the value is
clear.